jailing political opponents

from Dispatches from the Frontlines of America’s Third Red Scare by Wesley R. Bishop

Hello, dear readers, today’s report from the frontline of America’s Third Red Scare: Jailing Political Opponents.

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the United States launched what Woodrow Wilson’s presidential administration called a “defense of democracy.” To aid this the President leaned heavily on two laws—the Espionage Act of 1917 and its 1918 extension, the Sedition Act. These laws, however, were not used primarily against spies or foreign agents. They were used instead against citizens. Writers, speakers, publishers, organizers—anyone who dared to question the government’s involvement in WWI, its corporate interests in foreign policy, or the government’s claim to represent the people—were prosecuted, imprisoned, exiled.

This was the First Red Scare. And it did not begin with violence. It began with fear, made legal. Between 1917 and 1920, over 2,000 Americans were prosecuted under these laws. More than 1,000 were convicted. They included immigrants, unionists, anti-war activists, socialists, and even former elected officials. Their crime was nearly always the same: Speaking out. Publishing. Refusing to recite the proper lines of patriotic consensus.

Some names remain fairly well-known to Leftists—Emma Goldman, Eugene Debs. Others, like former U.S. Senator Richard Franklin Pettigrew, have been somewhat more forgotten in public memory. But when read together, their stories form a pattern. A government, confronted with dissent, chooses prosecution over upholding civil liberties. And a public, either trained to equate criticism with treason or who fear joining in chorus, accepts it.

Emma Goldman was arrested in 1917 for opposing the military draft. Her lectures had drawn attention for years—on anarchism, women’s rights, labor, and the tyranny of state violence. When the United States entered World War I, the government finally acted. Goldman and her longtime partner Alexander Berkman were convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to two years in federal prison. Upon release, they were deported to Russia. Goldman was not a bomber, nor a spy. She was a writer. A speaker. A dissident. The U.S. government treated that as a crime—and then made an example of her.

On June 16, 1918, in Canton, Ohio, Eugene V. Debs delivered a speech to a small crowd. He condemned the war in Europe and the economic system that profited from it. Weeks later, he was arrested and charged under the Espionage Act. “They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command,” Debs had said. He was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. From his cell, he ran for president in 1920 and received nearly a million votes. His only weapon had been his voice.

And then there was Richard Pettigrew, the first U.S. Senator from South Dakota. Born in Vermont in 1848 and raised on abolitionist values, Pettigrew moved west to Dakota Territory in the late 1860s. He was a surveyor, a lawyer, and eventually a city builder in Sioux Falls. But it was in Washington, during the rise of American imperialism, that Pettigrew became a problem for the ruling consensus.

Elected to the Senate in 1889 as a Republican, Pettigrew turned against his party when it backed the gold standard and corporate consolidation. He allied himself with the Populist movement and with the Silver Republicans—independent western radicals who rejected the stranglehold of eastern finance. He denounced monopolies, criticized the banking system, and warned of the creeping power of private capital over public life.

In 1898, as the U.S. prepared to annex Hawaii and seize Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and Pacific. Pettigrew argued, “The American flag went up on Hawaii… if it goes up again [and stays] now it will go up in infamy and shame and this government will join the robber nations of the world.” He voted against the annexation of Hawaii. He opposed the Philippine-American War and denounced the brutal suppression of Filipino independence. As he argued, the American war against the Filipino people could best be summed up as a mission “to find a field where cheap labor can be secured, labor that does not strike, that does not belong to a union, that does not need an army to keep it in leading strings, that will make goods for the trusts of this country.”

South Dakota voters removed him from office in 1900, but Pettigrew continued to work, publishing speeches, pamphlets, and essays attacking the rise of American plutocracy. In 1922, he published Triumphant Plutocracy: The Story of American Public Life from 1870 to 1920—a searing critique of oligarchy and war profiteering.

In 1917, Richard Franklin Pettigrew sat for an interview with a reporter from the Argus Leader. The nation was at war. The draft was in full swing. The Espionage Act had just been signed into law. And still, Pettigrew did not hold back.

The war, he said plainly, was a racket—“a capitalist scheme,” designed to stuff the pockets of the rich while the sons of the poor bled and died in foreign trenches. He told the young men of South Dakota not to go. He told them to resist. To think. To refuse.

It was enough. The local U.S. Attorney indicted Pettigrew under the Espionage Act—the same charge that would soon put Eugene V. Debs behind bars for a decade. Pettigrew was nearly 70 years old. A former U.S. Senator, his prosecution demonstrated that the Wilson Administration would go after anyone that defied it.

In 2013, Chelsea Manning stood trial before a military court for allegedly violating the same law. The crime? She told the truth. As an Army intelligence analyst, she had leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents—evidence of drone strikes, civilian deaths, and diplomatic deceit—to WikiLeaks. For that, the government charged her under the Espionage Act, accusing her not of lying, but of letting the public see too much. She was convicted on multiple counts and sentenced to 35 years. No soldier she exposed stood trial. Only her. After seven years in prison—including solitary confinement—President Obama commuted her sentence. But the message was already clear: transparency is treason.

Debs, too, would have his prison sentence commuted by President Harding in the following administration, after the war had passed and he was at the end of his life. Pettigrew’s trial frequently stalled and was set back as Pettigrew gathered a strong legal defense team. Eventually the government was forced to drop the charges. Goldman never permanently returned to the United States, eventually immigrating to Canada.

What is important to keep in mind is that each of America’s Red Scares have had their own boogey men. In the first, it was opposition to the World War. In the second, communism. In both of these cases, there was a swirling soup of xenophobia, militarism, racism, and demand for accepting authoritarian rule at home. Today, in our Third Red Scare, it is less communists and anti-war voices specifically being targeted, and more so immigrants—namely immigrants who are people of color.

Take for example in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Judge Hannah Dugan—an elected county circuit judge—was arrested and indicted by a federal grand jury for allegedly helping a Mexican national exit the courthouse through a back door, away from waiting ICE agents. She now faces two federal charges, and if convicted, could serve prison time. Her defenders argue that she upheld due process in the face of an aggressive immigration apparatus. Her indictment marks an alarming escalation in the criminalization of judicial discretion, drawing fierce criticism from Democrats who warn that the judiciary itself is now a target in the war on immigrants.

In Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka—one of the most vocal elected officials opposing ICE raids—was arrested outside an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility while protesting the detention of local residents. Charged with trespassing, he appeared in federal court this May for a status conference, where prosecutors confirmed their intent to bring him to trial in July. Baraka, defiant, addressed supporters outside the courthouse and called for the charges to be dismissed, framing the case as part of a broader campaign to silence local resistance to federal enforcement.

A sitting judge. A sitting mayor. Both arrested. Both charged. Neither accused of violence. Both punished for challenging the machinery of fear. When democratic institutions themselves become suspect—when law is wielded not to protect, but to pursue—we are no longer safeguarding the country. We are rehearsing its collapse into the hands of powerful oligarchs.

If the state can punish you for voicing opposition to war, or championing a different political idea, or shielding your friends, neighbors, and colleagues then it can criminalize opposition to its ideas and basic compassion.

As for Pettigrew, he took the federal indictment against him and had it framed. He then hung it on the wall of his home, right beside a copy of the Declaration of Independence. There, the two documents—one a birthright, the other a rebuke—remain side by side, a testament to the long American tradition of punishing those who speak too freely. Today, visitors to the Pettigrew Home & Museum can still see them on display, the indictment and the Declaration—proof that in this country, the line between patriot and criminal is often drawn by who dares to dissent.

This dear readers is where we are, and taking a page from previous generations of dissidents, our job is quite clear. Dissent, dissent, dissent. Challenge the laws that violate our basic decency. I promise you this— someday our efforts will be worthy of framing.